Nicolas Coppola, nephew of famed director Francis Ford Coppola, changed his name to Nicolas Cage to avoid having his career explained away in terms of nepotism. He took the name Cage because he admired avantgarde composer John Cage, as well as comic-book character Luke Cage. Nicolas Cage has become a major star, despite not possessing typical leading-man good looks. What Nicolas Cage does well is get into the parts he plays, even having a tooth pulled without novocaine so he could empathize with the soldier he played in Birdy (1984).
Born in Long Beach, California, Nicolas Cage began to act while he was enrolled in Beverly Hills High School. He dropped out of school at the age of 17 and won a part in the teen picture Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), which led to his starring role in Valley Girl (1983). Uncle Francis cast Nicolas in two early films, Rumble Fish (1983), a film about street punks, and The Cotton Club (1984), in which Nicolas Cage had a small part. Nicolas Cage also had a small part in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and starred in a Rocky-type movie featuring competitive rowing, Boy in Blue (1986). It was his role in the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona (1987) that brought him media attention.
Playing an ex-con who is a woefully inept hold-up man, Cage and his wife (Holly Hunter) kidnap a baby (one of five quintuplets), and the fun, complete with a biker ax-murderer in pursuit of the kidnappers, begins. That same year, he starred opposite Cher in Moonstruck, one of the best romantic comedies of the decade. Playing the role of a one-handed baker who loves opera and is an incurable romantic, he falls in love with Cher, who is engaged to his brother, whom he blames for the loss of his hand. True love triumphs. The film received several awards, and Nicolas Cage was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. Nicolas Cage finished the decade with two mediocre films, Vampire’s Kiss (1988) and Time to Kill (1989).
For the most part, Nicolas Cage did much better in the 1990s. He appeared in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), a film that was a critical success. This on-the-lam movie features Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern and is a study in contrasts between the couple’s wholesome love and the bizarre and obsessive love of the people the couple meet. Zandalee (1991), perhaps Nicolas Cage’s worst film, followed, but Nicolas Cage scored with Honeymoon in Las Vegas (1992), a romantic comedy in which he loses his bride-to-be to the James Caan character in a Las Vegas poker game.
In 1993, Nicolas Cage went from grifter in Deadfall to drifter in Amos and Andrew before hitting it big with Red Rock West, a film noir set in Wyoming. In the film Nicolas Cage plays a nice guy who is mistaken for a hit man played by Dennis Hopper. Inept thief in Trapped in Paradise, lotterysharing cop in the feel-good It Could Happen to You, federal agent in Guarding Tess, and ruthless villain, playing the part immortalized by Richard Widmark in the 1947 version, in Kiss of Death—Nicolas Cage ran the gamut of roles in 1994. His best role in the decade was as the hopeless, suicidal alcoholic who goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas (1995).
His performance won him all the Best Actor awards, including the Oscar. The following year, a bulkedup Nicolas Cage starred with Sean Connery in the action film The Rock. MTV gave Nicolas Cage and Connery an award for best onscreen duo. In 1997 Nicolas Cage appeared in Con-Air, another action thriller, and followed it with John Woo’s Face/Off, in which he and John Travolta exchange identities in a film that explores the line between the good (Nicolas Cage) and the bad (Travolta).
Two of Nicolas Cage’s 1998 films were action thrillers, 8mm, in which he plays a surveillance expert whose investigation leads him to the sleazy porn industry, and Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes, in which he plays a corrupt Atlantic City cop caught up in a Chinatown maze of intrigue. In the enjoyable, sentimental City of Angels, Nicolas Cage played an entirely different role, a guardian angel who falls in love with the Meg Ryan character. Nicolas Cage’s last role in the 1990s was as a burnt-out paramedic in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead.
In The Family Man (2000) Nicolas Cage reexamined his role, his work, and his values in a dramatic light comedy and then went back into action in Gone in Sixty Seconds before playing the romantic lead in the film adaptation of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which was a disappointment only to those readers familiar with the source novel’s incredible subtlety and complexity.
That complexity was the hallmark of Nicolas Cage’s performance in Adaptation (2002), in which he plays dual roles, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his brother Donald. Nicolas Cage has proven his ability in romantic comedy, thrillers, and dramas, and he also has entered the production game, with such films as Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Sonny (2001), and The Life of David Gale (2002).
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